That’s the question I have been asking myself for my entire life, but these days it’s louder than ever. I was born in Iran, which means I was born into a fight for the most basic things you can even imagine. I grew up surrounded by violence, bloodshed, cruelty, and monstrosity. And yet the worst part has never been the inhumanity itself, but the loneliness of witnessing it all. The silence. The feeling of losing hope in the world and its so-called “humanity,” day by day, because nobody seemed to care.
After decades of oppression, decades of protests and bodies and funerals, we are finally in the last stages of this fight. We are in a revolution. But we are also in a war, lonelier than ever, while the Islamic Republic becomes more savage than ever before. They are not just oppressing anymore. They are committing mass murder and war crimes against their own people.
So tell me: why does nobody care? Why don’t you care? How many times should Iranians go to the streets and get killed for the world to hear them? How many children should be shot and never come home? How many protesters should be executed? How many times must the regime turn off the lights, cut the internet, shut down all communication, and kill thousands in silence for you to pay attention?
It wouldn’t hurt this much if you genuinely didn’t know. But you do know. We tell you. We beg you. We spread every piece of information we can. We scream into the void hoping someone will listen. And the silence that follows is fucking unbearable. It wouldn’t hurt this much if you didn’t pretend to care about “human rights.” If you didn’t brag about your liberal ideas, your solidarity, your activism. If you didn’t give constant lectures on fascism and racism. But you do. You claim you care about human rights, so why do you ignore Iran? Why does your solidarity suddenly stop when it comes to us?
We in the diaspora are trapped. We sit in darkness, cut off from our loved ones, just as Iran is cut off from the world. We search for our families’ faces in the few videos that manage to escape the blackout. We read reports of mass casualties so overwhelming that health care professionals don’t even have time to perform CPR. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand the horror of families having to steal the corpses of their loved ones before the government gets to them? Do you understand what it means to be asked to pay “bullet money” for your murdered child? Do you understand that even our dead are not safe from these monsters?
You don’t get to claim “human rights” and ignore Iran. You don’t get to call yourselves activists when your activism stops the moment it becomes uncomfortable or “complex”. Your selective empathy, your performative solidarity, none of it saves lives. None of it means anything, when you stay silent when it matters the most.
If you really care about human beings, then start acting like it. Every Iranian in the diaspora I know is dying of guilt. It burns through our entire existence. We feel guilty for being alive. Guilty for not being there. Guilty for not fighting in the streets and dying next to our brothers and sisters. Guilty for not even daring to hope. And I still wonder: how can you not feel any of this?
How can you see us suffering, see us being killed, see our blood spilled in the streets, and not even talk about it? How can you watch us break, lose our homes, lose our people, lose our sanity, and not even ask if we are okay? How can you live with yourselves, knowing there are people just like you, full of life, dreams, and kindness, being killed right now for fighting for the same values you claim to believe in? How can you live with yourself? Because I can’t. I’m doing everything in my power to be the voice of the silenced, and yet I’m about to lose my mind out of rage and guilt any moment now, while you don’t even ask your Iranian friends how they are doing, let alone take action to save innocent lives.
Many of us are completely alone here. Can you imagine how much it would mean to receive just one message? A check-in during a crisis. A simple: Are you okay? Anyone can congratulate us on our birthdays, but we need friends who can message us when our homes are on fire.
What you read in books, hear in podcasts, watch in documentaries, or skip because of “content warnings”, that is our reality. It is our daily life. And we never get to take a break from it, not even from another continent.
If you truly care, make these abstract ideas part of your reality too. Live them. Act on them. Solidarity means nothing if it exists only when it’s easy. Stick all your “Fuck AfD” stickers everywhere you want, shout your slogans in the streets, but when you go home to your safe, privileged lives, don’t leave your solidarity behind. Carry it with you. Get used to it. Let it become part of you. I promise you, it’s not heavier than the trauma and grief we carry every single day.
That’s all I ask: keep shouting if you must, but start talking too. Say something. To your friends. To your students. To your coworkers. Open your eyes and see what is happening, even if it makes you uncomfortable, especially if it makes you uncomfortable. If you don’t know how to help, ask. Learn. Try. Anything is better than this soul-crushing silence.
Please talk about us. Talk about the Iranian people making history. Talk about their fight, their courage, their decades of resistance. Talk about the complete internet shutdown cutting off 90 million people from their loved ones and from the world so that no one will know they are being murdered. Talk about this deliberate attempt to isolate a nation, to silence voices, to hide crimes. And don’t just talk. This is not “a local issue” or “internal politics.” This is a humanitarian crisis. This is a regime committing war crimes in real time against unarmed civilians whose only weapons are their courage and their hope for a free Iran.
If you call yourselves activists, then act now, when it matters most. As Europeans, as citizens of democratic countries, you have privileges we don’t. Use them. Contact your MPs, journalists, politicians, representatives. Ask them to hold the Islamic Republic accountable. Demand consequences. Demand that the regime’s diplomats be expelled. Demand that the world stops legitimizing murderers.
People in Iran are being killed right now. Every minute. They have already had every chance for a normal life stolen from them. They were born into a totalitarian regime that destroyed their lives before they even began. The least you can do is talk about them, honor them, refuse to let their deaths disappear in silence. Not because it is noble, not because it makes you a better person, but because none of us are free until all of us are free. Stop your selective activism. Stop looking away. Be our voice. Be the activists you claim to be.
And don’t forget: this is no longer a protest.
This is a revolution.
Sayan Kouhzad
12.01.2026
